Alma's Botany Books

Submitted by swalzer on Mon, 2013-10-21 10:09

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert (author of Eat, Pray, Love) features a clever female botanist. If this fictional character, Alma, were to stop by our library, she might check out these books on the wild world of plants.

A tree that sheds poison daggers; a glistening red seed that stops the heart; a shrub that causes paralysis; a vine that strangles; and a leaf that triggered a war. Drawing on history, medicine, science, and legend, this compendium of bloodcurdling botany will entertain, alarm, and enlighten even the most intrepid gardeners and nature lovers.

Forager-journalist Becky Lerner sets out on a quest to find her inner hunter-gatherer in the city of Portland, Oregon. After a disheartening week trying to live off wild plants from the streets and parks near her home, she learns the ways of the first people who lived there and, along with a quirky cast of characters, discovers an array of useful wild plants hiding in plain sight. Lerner delves into anthropology, urban ecology and sustainability, and finds herself looking at Nature in a very different way.

Renowned naturalist and bestselling author Goodall examines the critical role that trees and plants play. She blends her experience in nature with her enthusiasm for botany to give readers a deeper understanding of the world.

A comprehensive survey of the plants that provide food, beverages, spices, and flavorings, this book will serve as an invaluable reference to gardeners, ethnobotanists, nutritionists, culinary professionals, dieticians, and food enthusiasts. This scientifically accurate guide will allow them to identify all the major plant-derived foods and flavors, research culinary uses, and understand their dietetic and nutritional properties.

Sake began with a grain of rice. Scotch emerged from barley, tequila from agave, rum from sugarcane, bourbon from corn. Stewart explores the dizzying array of herbs, flowers, trees, fruits, and fungi that humans have, through ingenuity, inspiration, and sheer desperation, contrived to transform into alcohol over the centuries. Of all the extraordinary and obscure plants that have been fermented and distilled, a few are dangerous, some are downright bizarre, and one is as ancient as dinosaurs but each represents a unique cultural contribution to our global drinking traditions and our history.

Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers' genes far and wide. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship.